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I had cast Sartre into the role of sociopath for so long that I couldn’t tell if the pain that flooded into his face was genuine or the role he thought he was meant to play. If it was a performance, though, he wasn’t playing it for me. As his eyes welled with tears he swatted Lanzo’s distancing hand away and pulled the younger man into an embrace. Lanzo collapsed into that hug, his tears returning as Sartre held the his face into the nape of his neck.
I stared at the hills of the vineyard and pretended I didn’t feel bad for Lanzo or Moreau. Several of the rooks exchanged cigarettes and muttered things indecipherably French, low tones of sympathy and commiseration.
In what was both a very long and short amount of time, Sartre ended the embrace. Still holding him by the shoulders, he gently shook both the younger man and himself, bringing them back to the reality of the sunny mountaintop that lived with murder just down the hill. When Lanzo raised his head again, Sartre caught his eye and asked, “Who did this?”
Lanzo sniffed and searched for words, shaking his head with the impotency of not knowing. In the pain of that moment, I found my mouth opening and I uttered words that were almost assuredly a bad idea. “It was the Russians.”
Still holding Lanzo, the intimidating fire came back into Sartre’s eyes. “Mitnick did this?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. There’s a different crew from the mother country in town. They did this.”
“Why?”
“They’re looking for who killed Sergei,” I lied. “They were trying to ask Moreau some questions. I think things got out of hand.”
Lanzo, understandably confused, asked, “How do you know this?”
I shrugged, feeling the tightness of the trench coat. “I put it together on the way up. I ran into a few of them.” For simplicity, I combined the encounters with Mikhail and Pyotr. “They were asking about Sergei.”
“How did they know about this?” Sartre leaned into the question’s new pronoun.
“They’d heard I’d been asking around about Sergei. They wanted to know why.” I nodded decidedly at Lanzo.
The possible connection between Sergei, Lanzo, and his uncle began to clear the fog of pain that had been on Lanzo since the garage. “Sergei was with Nika.”
A bit of his anger rose again at being left on the outside as Sartre said, “Who?”
“I met Nika and Sergei at the Factory,” Lanzo mumbled, almost to himself. “We…they think I killed Sergei?”
“They think you know something about it.”
Lanzo pinched his lower lip, considering this new information. Sartre, though, was still firmly focused on his own business. “How did they find out about the station if la batard did not tell them?”
“A bunch of the new Russians are in town. I caught one of them tailing me at the casino. They’ve got an eye on your whole operation.”
Sartre pivoted back to the boulder and placed a hand on it. The many holes in the story I was spinning combined with what I didn’t know about Sartre’s knowledge moved my blood faster, swelling my feet and heating my skin in a way that had nothing to do with the afternoon sun. I ignored this until Sartre asked, “You said it was Mitnick who killed this Sergei? Why would he do this if Sergei was with his allies?”
I shrugged. “Best guess? Sergei was supposed to keep an eye on Nika and Mitnick killed him when he found out he had let Nika fall in with the local rabble.” I gestured to Lanzo at that mention. “She must be too important to someone back home to allow that.”
Sartre patted the boulder, trying to transfer some of its stability to himself. “So they killed Moreau in their search for Sergei? This makes no sense if they knew he was at the station.”
I tried to keep my mouth from hanging open as I was caught in this simple mistake of my timeline. I could feel a gleeful shiver descend from the lizard part of my brain as it considered the violence that would be necessary to get out of this. Three guards here, three back at the house, two more on the driveway. The lizard uncoiled its tail from my spine as it whispered, “We’re not getting out of this.”
I shuffled my swelling feet until I was surprised by Atwell. “They weren’t asking Moreau about Sergei. They were asking about Lanzo.” I slapped away the part of my brain that was planning the fight as all eyes turned toward Atwell. “There were multiple bodies at the station with Sergei’s. Bodies you hadn’t put there, Sartre. One of them was a Frenchman. That was your rat.” I felt the story settle as Atwell layered mortar between the bricks of my lies.
Mitnick’s dubiety wasn’t completely swayed, though. “Mitnick kills this man over a girl. One he is meant to protect?”
Before Sartre could continue to string our flimsy facts together, Atwell continued for him. “Mitnick tried to pin it on you and that fell through when you found the body first. The new Russians showed up looking for Sergei and they sniffed out the station. They argued – maybe they found out who really killed Sergei and they fought. That turns into a couple more corpses. So whoever walked away called the police, hoping to cause you trouble. I got into the middle of that, but…” Atwell nodded towards Lanzo, “The Factory connects all of this to him.”
“Mitnick has brought trouble to my shores, killed my friend, and now wishes to kill Moreau’s blood?” Sartre’s anger hadn’t abated through any of this, but I could feel it shifting away from us. “Because of his own mistake?”
Whatever lizard-tailed part of my brain had anticipated violence hissed its denial as I took a page from Atwell’s book. “We can turn this into an opportunity.”
The heat of Sartre’s anger was dampened by those words, his cunning stronger than his desire for instant gratification. “What do you mean?”
I shrugged, the components for what I was laying out already in place. “Mitnick’s got trouble with his own people. If he’s supposed to protect her and she disappears, on top of everything else…”
Sartre grinned with the wicked pleasure of the tormented who suddenly finds he’s holding his torturer’s whip. “If he loses the girl, they will kill him for it.”
I shrugged again to say maybe. It was warm enough now that I would have taken off the trench coat if I hadn’t been hiding the revolver under it.
Sartre’s anger and hatred boiled out of him in a braying laugh. While we stood there, he laughed as if the plot was formed by his one true fat god, Luck, and was handed to him after months of frustration in having to deal with Mitnick. He raised his head to laugh at the sky until he turned to each of his men, laughing in their faces until they slowly joined him.
When he eventually began to peter out, he wiped a tear of pure joy out of the corner of one eye. “Yes, go do this. Take the girl, hide her away. I will keep you safe while the Russians eat each other.”
I nodded, afraid to say anymore.
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